Beginners' Guide to FTB
"Help me! What the hell do I do?!" New to FTB? Then this page is for you! This guide will tell you exactly what you should do to end up with a solid setup to work with. From there, it's up to you! Copper You'll probably want a lot of storage space because of all the new items. You'll want to smelt 8 copper ore and have it surround a chest.This will make a copper chest which is bigger than your regular chest. (However, at this point, you will be using copper more heavily, so it is best to build an iron chest, which has more storage space.) Smelt some tin and make bronze. Copper can be made into Copper Wire which is used in a lot of recipes and is used to supply power to machines if they are not next to a power source (EU only). Coating them with rubber from smelting sticky resin (hopefully you have some) will be required for more advanced machines. Power Seeing as most Machines require Power in the form of EU (IC2 stuff) or MJ (Buildcraft stuff) it would be best to build a Generator and a batbox. Don't waste coal, for it Coal is more useful in other ways, instead take some of the wood you have and turn it into Charcoal in your normal Furnace(or Iron Furnace if you decided to upgrade) A Generator will need Redstone and copper as well as refined Iron to make, so an Iron pick is necessary. A Wrench made from Bronze will turn machines with a right click (be sure to use the right one) Alternatively, one can make an engine to produce MJs. Beginners often use peat-fired or stirling engines because they are cheap to make and fuel. Engines can be broken and replaced with a pick, but have to be rotated with a wrench. Next thing you should work towards is grinding up the Ores of Iron, Copper, Tin into their dust forms to double the amount of iron you get. This can be done a few ways, two being a Macerator and a Pulverizer. Once you have these you can start looking into other more efficent forms of power, from water and wind energy to Solar and Biofuels. Mining There are a few ways Mining has changed from vanilla, from tools to automatic mining. - The first way is vanila going in with your pick and searching yourself. This has be upgraded with various tools that don't break, but use power (bring a batpack or lappack if you have one to recharge them). These new tools are as simple as using ruby or saphires in place of diamonds in a normal pick. to the omnitool tools (if it is used) to lazer guns, drills, etc. If the resources are available, it is best to craft a diamond mining drill rather than a pick, as it acts the same and never breaks. - The second way is use of turtles to hunt for ores in a pre-exsisting program or one of your own. This is very good because your items won't break and you can fuel the turtles with charcoal or something renewable. The turtles have a variaty of functions, but to use them in mining put the base turtle in a crafting bench with a new diamond pick to make a mining turtle. - Third is by going for the buildcraft Filler and using it along with landmarks to hollow out an area completly (a lot of cobblestone that might be useful later) this is good for clearing large rooms quickly if you want to be setting up a base (Note redstone engines are not powerful enough to run this, use a sterling or greater engine), but is also drops all the items on the ground. this destroys water sources, but doesn't work around lava. This machine works from the bottom up. - Fourth is Very expensive the quarry automatically mines everything under it save for liquids. Lava will prevent it from working in the area the lava covers. It does however work top down and and pops everything it collects out of the top of the machine allowing for easier piping to chests. Buildcraft engines are required for it to run, with more MJ per tick making it faster. It is recommended to place water in a quarry to automatically cool the lava. Obsidian can easily be aquired this way. Farms Now for most auto farms (and their harvesters) you will need something called a Thermionic Fabricator to make some of the components. Don't let the name scare you it is actually pretty easy to make. the hardest part will be finding the Copper and Tin to make Bronze. It will also open up the Forestry mod's stuff to you. It also helps with the Beekeeping (YAY Backpacks TO HOLD things) Turtles Ok lets be honest who hasn't wanted a small army of robots? Or a Large army of robots? Well turtles are perfect if you like programming. They can pretty much do anything you can do in Minecraft if you craft them as such. Mining to combat, farming to lighting, building to logging these little guys can do it all, they are aslo pretty cheap and they can be used wirelessly. By typing tunnel (however long you want it to be) it will dig a 2 block high, 3 block wide tunnel. With excavate (width and length), it will act the same as a quarry, digging down to bedrock. First Turtles are from computercraft and are build from computers, this means you will need stone, glass and redstone as well as wood and diamonds if you want them to work for you. You will need some kind of fuel source as well. they will accept anything burnable, lava, or electricity from one of the other mods in the modpack. Do not use regular coal for these, as stated earlier. You also can use them for mining again! Mystcraft If you are going the route of mystcraft you need to make linking books to the overworld. This is pretty simple, all you need to do is take a normal book and put it in your crafting square to make a simple Linking Book. Once you have your linking book take another normal book and get a feather. craft the Book and Feather to get a Descriptive book(which doesnt work in 1.2.3). This descriptive book has nothing assosiated with it yet until you right click then left click the square inside it. The descriptive book you have will warp you to a new randomly generated world with diffrent variables from change in the progression of time, the biomes allowed in the work, if it has bedrock at the bottom or lack there of, dense ores or a unique block called crystals that you can use to craft portals like the portal to the nether. When you arive at this world you will see that the book you had is gone, but your linking book (if you had it on you) will still be there. You can explore a bit, but it is recomended that you zip back and pick up the dropped book where you used it and put it in a writting desk to rename/jot down the diffrences the new world has in comparison to the overworld. You will need to make lots of discriptive books and linking books until you can make the final item in mystcraft called a Linkmodifier(really expensive) to make the linking books follow you when you use them. It is recomended that you make a writing desk and a notebook before or a little after you explore a few worlds. WARNING if you die in another world and can not back to the linking book back to the overworld you will be stuck there and will need another player to bring you a linking book. if this happens spawn in a nether portal where you spawned in the world. Then place another nether portal in the nether. You will be back in the overworld. What next? Personaly, make farms to keep yourself sustainable. - A wheat, sugercane, chicken and cow farm (at least the old style kind) are a must if you want to head into mystcraft. - A Rubber Tree farm is very important for the creation of machines - Peat farms are a good source of power for the MJ (a good goal to head to) - Build Extractors, Builders, Grinders and much more! you can even upgrade a your macerator or your pulverizer to a better one